ragged fortunes and swashbuckling thrillers

231 Pages·2013·5.43 MB·English

by  Lujan Herrera

RAGGED FORTUNES AND SWASHBUCKLING THRILLERS;
OR ,
RECREATING THE VICTORIAN IN YOUNG ADULT FICTION
1985–2011
By
Maria Lujan Herrera

A thesis
submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington
in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy

Victoria University of Wellington
(2013)
ABSTRACT

The Victorian era has become a fashionable setting for contemporary young adult
fiction. Studies of the contemporary pseudo-Victorian novel have focussed almost
entirely upon fiction for adults. Scarcely any attention has been paid to their young
adult equivalents — the subject of this thesis. Despite being marketed as “historical”
fiction, these works do not adopt actual Victorian history as its basis but are influenced
by the literature of the time instead. The chief inspirations are authors such as Dickens
and Conan Doyle rather than Victorian children’s classics.
After demonstrating the appropriation of Victorian literature in the young adult
novels of Pullman, Bajoria, Updale, and Lee, I discuss the function of this Victorian
dimension. The nineteenth-century “essential” categories under study here — London,
prostitutes, opium dens, orphans, detectives — once embodied Victorian anxieties
regarding class, social upheaval, gender politics, colonial guilt, and nationalism. But
when contemporary writers evoke Victorian ghosts, they are putting forth their own
world view.
Consequently, these texts are doubly haunted. Heavy with Victorian ideologies,
they simultaneously propagate new fears (for instance, terrorism) and appeal to
contemporary sensitivities (particularly feminism). Where Victorian values do not
align with the authors’ own, they are challenged and “updated”. Whenever they are
made to agree, the reader is confronted with assumptions and prejudices that echo
disturbingly through the centuries.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

One of the joys of completion is to look back over the past years and remember all the
people that have helped make this road both academically and personally fulfilling. It
was my parents who instilled a love of literature in me, and I would like to thank them
for their loving and constant encouragement … and also for getting posted to New
Zealand. My family and friends, old and new, have been an equally inspiring force
with their loud cheering from Argentina and steady support from New Zealand.
I am extremely grateful to Victoria University for granting me the scholarship
that enabled this thesis, and for funding my travels for conferences and research.
My supervisors, Kathryn Walls and Jane Stafford, deserve a huge
acknowledgement. They have always had the time and patience to answer my frequent
(and unexpected) knocks on their doors, as well as my sometimes fussy doubts. Their
unstinting commitment, detailed feedback, and gentle guidance have been crucial to the
completion of this work.
Long days in the office have always been easier due to my officemates: Naomi,
Isabel and Eden. I am especially grateful for Saskia’s friendship, with whom I have
shared this office, and journey, from beginning to end. In fact, the entire English
Department and its always friendly and cheerful postgraduate students have made my
time at Victoria memorable.
I am indebted to Tristan and Sam for patiently reading my work and providing
encouraging feedback (sometimes with exclamation marks!), and to Ronan for chasing
away typos and all kinds of grammatical horrors. Andre also deserves credit for
generously hosting me while in London.
I started this thesis single and I end it married, but the support and belief my
then-boyfriend-now-husband has shown has been unwavering throughout. Thank you
Phil.

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Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for
the use of copyright material.

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CONTENTS
ABSTRACT..................................................................................................................... i
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................................. ii
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 1
CHAPTER ONE
London within London: Victorian Spaces within Contemporary Texts ....................... 18
CHAPTER TWO
Victorian Prostitutes and Fallen Women: Revising the Great Social Evil .................... 47
CHAPTER THREE
Chasing the Dragon: East End Opium Dens ................................................................ 79
CHAPTER FOUR
Ragged Orphans: Street Arabs Old and New ............................................................ 106
CHAPTER FIVE
“Modern” Detectives on the Trail of “Victorian” Criminals ...................................... 144
CHAPTER SIX
Victorian Values Redux............................................................................................ 177
CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 208
WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................... 211
WORKS CONSULTED ................................................................................................ 222

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INTRODUCTION

Young adult novels set in the Victorian era emerged in the late 1980s. I first
encountered the genre through Philip Pullman’s Sally Lockhart series (1985–1994), the
popularity of which is evident from its re-issue (by Scholastic) in 2004. Indeed, Philip
Pullman can be considered the first major author of modern young adult “Victorian”
literature (just as John Fowles was of modern adult “Victorian” literature with his 1969
novel The French Lieutenant's Woman). Realising Pullman was not always aiming at a
genuinely historical depiction of the Victorian era, I investigated other authors whose
work was similarly packaged. I wanted to establish the extent, and limits, of their debt
to Victorian literary tradition, and to interpret their often very free adaptation of
Victorian material.
Neo-Victorian novels proliferated at the beginning of the millennium, the young
adult versions coinciding with the adult novels such as Tipping the Velvet (1998),
Affinity (1999), and Fingersmith (2002) by Sarah Waters, Michel Faber’s The Crimson
Petal and the White (2002) and Lee Jackson’s oeuvre. The young adult texts include
the Eddie Dickens series (2000–2007) by the Scottish writer Philip Ardagh, and The
Mad Misadventures of Emmaline and Rubberbones series (2006–2008) by the English
author Howard Whitehouse (the former being particularly interesting in its use of
irony). Jane Eagland, Linda Newbery, Marthe Jocelyn, Catherine Webb, and Anna
Godbersen have also contributed to this field. The genre also includes a fantasy strand:
Paul Steward and Chris Riddell’s Barnaby Grimes stories (2008–2010) include zombies
and wolf-men, and G.P. Taylor’s Mariah Mundi books (2007–2009) could also be
included. Philip Reeve’s interesting Larklight series (2006–2008) can be classified as
“steam-punk” as it offers a mechanized version of the nineteenth-century.
The following study is, however centred on realist (but purely fictional)
examples. It embraces Pullman’s work — the Sally Lockhart series (1985–1994) — as
seminal, along with a selection of “core” works published between 2003 and 2011.
These include Eleanor Updale’s Montmorency series (2003–2006), Paul Bajoria’s
Printer’s Devil trilogy (2004–2007), Brian Keaney’s Nathaniel Wolfe (2008–2009)
mysteries, and Y.S. Lee’s The Agency books (2009–2011). In addition, I refer to Libba
Bray’s Gemma Doyle (2003–2007) stories, Nancy Springer’s Enola Holmes (2006–
2010) books, Mary Hooper’s Fallen Grace (2010), and Michael Ford’s The Poisoned
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House (2010). Updale, Bajoria, Keaney, Hooper, and Ford are all English; Lee is
Canadian; Bray and Springer are American.
These texts can be seen as a discrete genre not only because of the similarities
they share — explored in this thesis — but also because they distinguish themselves
from other works with Victorian elements. The aforementioned adult neo-Victorian
novels exemplify what Linda Hutcheon defines as “historiographic metafiction”, which
works to alert the reader to both history and fiction as “discourses, human constructs"
(93). While some of these young adult fictions contain occasional metafictional features,
their agenda is far from the adults’ one. Indeed, by invoking what looks like history,
they endow what is essentially fantasy with an aura of realism. In addition, as this
thesis will demonstrate, since they are not dedicated to an accurate factual portrayal of
the era, they cannot be categorized as historical fiction. It is also important to
understand that these texts are specifically young adult works, something evident in the
tone and in the topics treated (sex, prostitution and drugs, for example). This
distinguishes them from Leon Garfield's fiction. They may be distinguished, too, from
mid-century earlier children’s fiction with Victorian settings: they do not offer
alternative history, as Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase (1962); nor are
they portal fantasies, such as Penelope Lively's A Stich in Time (1976).
The question arises as to why writers for young adults should be attracted to the
Victorian genre. Its educational aura (given its alignment with the standard means of
conveying history to children by setting stories about children living in the historical
period at stake) may be a factor. There is, too, an overlap between the Victorian
(imagined or authentic) and “the Gothic” as popularized by rock since the early 1970s
and 80s — such as Nick Cave, and The Cure (Spooner, Contemporary Gothic 8) — and
subsequently embraced by an adolescent sub-culture. This sub-culture still exists. In
addition, there is what might be described as “Gothic for the mainstream” — as
epitomized by Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), Kenneth Branagh’s
Frankenstein (1994), Buffy (1997–2003), and Scream and its sequels (1996–2011). It
will be evident, however, that such answers pose further questions. Moreover, to
pursue them remains beyond the scope of this present study which focuses on the trend
rather than on its causes, however interesting they may be.
The standard classification of these books (in popular sites such as Amazon or
Good Reads) as “historical fiction” is associated with marketing that promotes their
supposed authenticity. The blurbs declare that “the sights and sounds of late-
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nineteenth-century London” are drawn “beautifully” in the Enola Holmes adventures.
Bray’s Gemma Doyle trilogy is “[s]et against the rich backdrop of Victorian London, a
place of shadows and light, in a time of strict morality and barely repressed sensuality”.
Nathaniel Wolfe’s supernatural stories take place “among the winding streets of
Victorian London”. Set in Stone “[e]xactly captures genteel Victorian diction”. Lee’s
first book in her “Victoria detective trilogy” takes place on May 1858, while “a foul-
smelling heat wave paralyses London”, thus making use of London’s historical Great
Stink. Updale is praised for “a fascinating visit to the Victorian era” (Montmorency’s
Revenge). As for Pullman, the covers of three of the Sally Lockhart adventures claim
they are set in “Victorian London” or are “Victorian thrillers”. He goes so far to
preface the books with “Certain Items of Historical Interest”: factual data centred on the
year the book takes place in (1872, 1878, 1881, and 1882).
Despite this claims of historical authenticity and research, the tradition within
which these books truly lie is, in fact, a literary one. The blurb of Updale’s
Montmorency claims that she “effortlessly inherits the mantle of John Buchan and R. L.
Stevenson”, while Linda Newbery’s Set in Stone (2006) “[c]alls to mind the Brontë
sisters”. Pullman has in fact acknowledged this. In a 1992 article, subsequently
published as a chapter of Historical Fiction for Children: Capturing the Past (2001), he
discloses that the inspiration for The Ruby in the Smoke was merely an Edwardian
postcard.1 On his website, he discusses the Sally Lockhart books in a similar vein:

Historical thrillers, that's what these books are. Old-fashioned Victorian blood-
and-thunder. Actually, I wrote each one with a genuine cliché of melodrama right
at the heart of it, on purpose: the priceless jewel with a curse on it — the madman
with a weapon that could destroy the world — the situation of being trapped in a
cellar with the water rising — the little illiterate servant girl from the slums of
London who becomes a princess … And I set the stories up so that each of those
stock situations, when they arose, would do so naturally and with the most
convincing realism I could manage. (“The Sally Lockhart quartet”, italics mine)

Pullman’s representation of the stories as founded upon “clichés” and “stock
situations”, and his criterion of being convincing “enough”, certainly places the stories

1 Regardless, the abstract for the article talks about Pullman’s “historical trilogy” (102).
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outside the scope of historical fiction.2 Dennis Butt has remarked how Pullman “often
gently reminds his reader that he or she is reading a story, not simply looking at a
mirror of the world” (85).3 In an article on Bajoria, published in 2007, Christopher
Ringrose shrewdly acknowledges that “making sense of the past is difficult to separate
from a tendency to pastiche the texts of the past” (215), and touches on the self-
conscious functionality of The Printer’s Devil.
It should be noted that even where fictional precedents are acknowledged as
such, they may be no more authentic than the fictionalised “history”. At the end of
Fallen Grace, Hooper includes “Some Historical Notes from the Author” (297). The
notes under the heading of Charles Dickens inform the reader that:

Dickens selected the steps on London Bridge to be the setting of the brutal murder
of Nancy, the girl who befriends Oliver, by Bill Sykes, the most evil character in
the book. The steps immediately became a tourist attraction, and even nowadays
on a walking tour of Southwark one will be told about ‘Nancy’s Steps’. (305–06)

This account seriously contradicts Oliver Twist. Nancy can hardly be said to “befriend”
the orphan but, more significantly, Sikes kills Nancy in the lodgings they share. It is
only in the musical version — Lionel Bart’s Oliver! (1960) — that Nancy is killed on
the bridge. In other words, Hooper inadvertently employs the popular musical as if it
was the original.
A significant number of scholarly articles and critical books have been
published on twentieth and twenty-first century “Victorian” novels. But these have
been dedicated, for the most part, to adult fiction. They include John Kucich and
Dianne F. Sadoff’s Victorian Afterlife: Postmodern Culture Rewrites the Nineteenth
Century (2000), Christine L. Krueger’s Functions of Victorian Culture at the Present
Time (2002), Cora Kaplan’s Victoriana: Histories, Fictions, Criticism (2007), Simon
Joyce’s The Victorians in the Rearview Mirror (2007), and Louisa Hadley Neo-
Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us (2010). In addition,
the University of Swansea started publishing the on-line journal Neo-Victorian Studies
in 2008. Margaret D. Stetz ends her recent (2012) article by remarking that “ironic,

2 At another point in the article Pullman again refers to his “research” as something done “to invent
convincingly” (104).
3 Such instances help the reader to further question the relationship between history and story, reality and
fiction.
4
playful, appreciative, and/or traumatic versions of Victorianism abound in literature for
younger readers” and that “they deserve critical attention” (345). The following study
is intended to fill some of the gap identified by Stetz.

Entering the Victorian: Paratextual Portals

Alice’s falling head-first “Down, down, down” (Carroll 10) a rabbit hole to find herself
in Wonderland is a classic image of children’s literature, as is the moment when Lucy
steps inside the wardrobe and emerges into the winter woods of Narnia. Alice and Lucy
each take the reader into the fantasy with them in one swift motion. In time-slip
narratives where the other world is, supposedly, the past, the transition tends to take the
form of a specific event. In Philippa Pearce’s, Carnegie Medal winning, Tom's
Midnight Garden (1958), the said hour reveals to Tom a beautiful garden in Victorian
times where his uncle’s small backyard usually is. In the similarly popular Green
Knowe series (1954–1976), characters are either told stories about the former
inhabitants of the manor house of Green Knowe, or actually experience time shifts
themselves, as Roger does in The Stones of Green Knowe (1976).4
In the narratives under study here, the clear-cut differentiation between the
characters’ world and the past they gain access to is absent. The starting point of these
tales is Queen Victoria’s England. It is the format (the cover colors, the typography,
and the illustrations) that stands in for the portal or portal moment, signaling to the
reader that these stories take place in the past — the book itself becomes the portal.
Victorian models are transformed into “faux” Victorian objects. This packaging gives
the illusion that by opening the book, the reader is indeed crossing a time gap and
entering the Victorian era. Publishers tend to use the soft and sober colours of the
Victorian era on the covers (see fig. 1).5 Lining these new books together creates an
amalgam of dark and earthy hues. The 2004 Scholastics edition of Pullman’s Sally
Lockhart texts (see fig. 2) presents us with dull, subdued tones of burgundy, purple,
green and blue (one colour per book). The 2009 and 2010 Walker Books editions of
Lee’s Agency series are similar (see fig. 3).6 The cover in the series’ first book comes in

4 Lucy M. Boston wrote six books in this series, which explore the lives of people in different periods:
under the reign of Charles II, the English Regency, and the Norman Conquest.
5 Figures are placed at the end of their corresponding chapters.
6 Lee’s books have recently been re-issued. This new edition (2011–12) features covers where the
protagonist poses in Victorian clothing against Victorian backgrounds.
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